The Last Gift (19 page)

They only talked at night at first, but after a few days, he began to talk in the afternoon, no longer able to contain his eagerness to tell. She saw his growing excitement in the telling, waiting for her to be available to him and only frustrated by his struggle with words. She bought him a small recording machine so he could speak into it when he wanted, even when she was not around. He looked at it in surprise and put it down beside his chair in the living room. Then one afternoon he began to talk about the girl on the terrace. She was surprised at first because he never talked about women he knew before, but then she thought it would be another one of the memories he was displaying to her, a flirtation, a teenage escapade. Quite quickly, his eyes and his voice told her that they were approaching the reason for his silence for all these years. It did not take him long. He did not hesitate except when his tongue failed him, and he did not digress or elaborate, not on this first telling. When he had finished telling her about the woman he married and abandoned when she was pregnant, they sat without speaking for a while. They were sitting in the back room, looking out on the garden, and through the open terrace door she could hear the blackbirds singing. She tried not to think of the word, but it forced itself into her mind. Bigamist. She felt suddenly weary about the complications that lay ahead. He sat in front of her, thin and tortured, staring at the floor.

‘You wait thirty years to tell me that you were already married when you married me,’ she said, gently. ‘That you are not really married to me.’

He looked surprised. ‘Of course I’m married to you,’ he said, incredulous.

‘Not according to the law,’ she said, incredulous herself, thinking that perhaps it had never occurred to him that he was a bigamist.

‘What law?’ he said. ‘You’re my wife. What are you talking about?’

After a while, she asked: ‘Will you tell the children?’ He looked helpless for a moment and then nodded. ‘Later,’ he said.

It must have all been much more complicated than the way he told it but that is what he was keeping to himself for all those years, that he ran away and abandoned a wife and child. He did not mention her name but she would get him to say it. She would not allow him to go back into hiding again. Her mind produced an image, imprecise and vague, composed from a jumble of other images. It was the figure of a mother and child in an unfamiliar landscape, just a shadow or a silhouette of a woman and a child passing down a lane. She was not sure exactly why it caused her such pain. Will he tell the children? Should he tell the children? What will he tell them? Should they just keep quiet, for an easy life? The world is probably choking with bigamists.

He would have been nineteen years old when he did that, abandoned his wife and unborn child. He never sent word to anyone afterwards, and never ever met anyone who knew him before. That was what he said. He did not have a photograph or a single scrap of anything that connected him to that place, he made sure of that, and she certainly had not seen anything like that in all their lives together. She tried to work it out for herself, to understand what could have made him so frightened, what exactly could have panicked him into doing such a thing. They went back to it several times. He told her her name, and her brothers’ names, who were not really her brothers and who were obsessed with their lusts. He told her how they mocked him and intimidated him. He no longer knew whether the marriage was a trap or not. He no longer knew what to believe. He did not know how he had managed to do it, to run away, but that was what he did.

How could he have made himself believe that miserable old excuse that the child was not his? She did not say that to him because she did not want him to stop talking. Instead she asked: Why could he not speak about what had happened? Why could he not even speak to her after all these years of their lives?

Could she not see why he could not? He was frightened of what he had done, and for so long there was no one to tell anyway.

No one? she asked.

He shrugged. By the time he met her he was well set in his ways, and thought of himself as someone who roamed the world without responsibility or connection. When he said to her that they should leave Exeter, he did not realise what he was doing. At that time, if he was in a place and he did not like what was going on, he just left. He could come and go as he pleased. When he said to her, let’s go, he was treating her as if she was like him, someone who could just leave. He did not think it would be for life, he thought it would be a pretty fling then they would get on with what they wanted to do. But after that he could not bear to lose her.

She was trying to understand why he was so frightened.

He laughed. She did not understand how tiny the place he came from was, how tiny their lives felt there. He was frightened of the world, that was what he was frightened of. Or maybe he was just fearful by nature. And he was acting shamefully, he knew that. There are things that are unacceptable to everyone, and that people will despise you for doing. He knew this was one of them, and that he would be despised by everyone for doing what he had done. And yet he had still done it, terrified as he was. Only afterwards he was ashamed. Only afterwards he learned to supress his terror and his shame and to live his life like a hooligan.

She was also trying to understand the shame he felt for what he had done, what kind of shame it was that made him choose to live with that guilt in silence, when he could have told her and found some relief, as he had now in the end. Or he could have told all of them, and found some sympathy for his act of stupidity, as he surely would have done. How could he manage to keep silent? She was trying to understand that.

They sat quietly for a while, and in that silence she felt the beginnings of nausea. She was getting tired of listening to him. His story was wearying something inside her, making her want to retreat from his pleading eyes. She was feeling worn out now, she said to him. Maybe later he can tell her
how
he ran away. She’d like to hear something about how that happened. Or was he tired of talking about this whole subject for now?

He was tired of
not
talking about these things, of not saying so much, and she must be too, he said. She saw that his brow was running with sweat, and she passed her hand over it to wipe away the moisture. She saw that he too was exhausted, and she said they should leave it for now. Why don’t you cool off in the garden for a while and then we can continue later. He protested, his face beginning to pucker with rage, but she told him that he was just being stubborn. She rose to her feet as she spoke, making it clear that she was not interested in a discussion. She knew that he wanted to talk on but she did not want to hear any more, not just then. She did not want to listen to his voice, or hear about his grief. She wanted to hear nothing, no more words. He would not speak to her for days now, she knew.

From the kitchen she heard him talking to himself, whispering. He did that sometimes and when she went near to hear what he was saying, he stopped. She thought he was talking in his own language but she could not be sure. It could just be his own gibberish. He groaned at any time of day or night, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, hideous agonized groans, sometimes in the depths of the night, and could not be silenced for minutes on end. There were times when she stood in front of him while he sat in his chair in the living room, his eyes open and unseeing, groaning with an anguish like sobs, while tears ran down his face.

‘What is it, Abbas? What is it that hurts?’

But he could not be reached when he was like that, and she held him and tried to rock him or shake him out of his trance. At times he allowed this and at other times he shook her off. Then he became abusive, calling her names: you moron, you whore. A lot of the time he sat by himself, doing nothing, looking out of the window, or reading a newspaper or doing the crossword. A few days ago she heard him rambling softly about Regents Park and Tutankhamun, chuckling and smiling, hectoring someone and whispering for minutes on end. She thought it was the medication confusing him.

She went upstairs to put the washing away and to air the bedroom, and she saw that he had gone out in the garden and was sitting on the terrace. The sun was behind the house that late in the afternoon, and the terrace was in the shade. He was bent forward, elbows on the arms of the chair, sitting in his profound stillness, although she thought she could see his neck shiver even from that distance. Will it occur to him that he had not only been silent about his shame, but that he had been lying to them, to her, for thirty years? What will she have done, that woman he left behind? She will have given him up for lost and divorced him for abandonment. Can you do that in Zanzibar? Divorce an absent husband? Or will she still be waiting for him to return, trapped by his absence? Perhaps in his eyes he was not even a bigamist since he was allowed four wives in his Islam, and he married her under those rules, probably. Why four? Why not three or five or six? In his favour, it has to be said that after taking one in this system he has not taken another. What will he tell his children? Their children. Will he tell them that they are the children of a bigamist?

Jamal rang home one evening a few days later. He was on his own in the house: Lisa and Jim had gone for a week’s break in Berlin where they had a friend. You’ll love Berlin, they told him, you must go there one day. Lena had gone home to Dublin for a few days, and was then going camping or boating on the Shannon or something like that with her boyfriend. Both Jim and Lena were on the same submission deadline as him, and he could not understand where they found the audacity to take a break. He was at his desk whenever he had the strength, writing, checking details, revising, with the internet as a bit of a break when he got weary and blocked. He rang his Ma because he felt perpetually guilty about not calling her. He did not think she enjoyed speaking on the phone; she was always eager to end the conversation and never delayed him when he said he had to go. Ba was the legendary hater of the telephone who winced when it began to ring and scowled furiously while anyone was speaking on it. Yet even though they were perhaps happy enough not being rung, Jamal still felt bad for not ringing. He should call to ask after them, and for them to know that he cared how they were. Yes, he had good reason to feel at fault. The last time he called was two weeks or so ago, and it must be more than a month since he had been down to see them. The news then was of improvement, but he should show his face, be a caring son at a time when his father was ill and his mother in distress. So he rang that night, alone and feeling the loneliness, but feeling good about the progress he was making with writing up his thesis; almost there, for what it was worth. That was what he told her, almost there.

When he asked about Ba, she said he was doing fine, able to say and do more every day. He thought she was being careful and guessed that all was not well, or that he was within earshot and she could not speak freely. She did not suggest passing the phone to Ba. He asked if she was all right, and she said yes, yes, what could be wrong with her? So he said that he was thinking of coming to see them at the weekend, and after a moment he heard the smile in her voice as she said, that will be lovely.

He was contemplating emailing Hanna, to see if she was free to come as well (he knew that Nick would somehow be too busy), when his heart jumped from a noise downstairs and he knew at once that it was someone trying to force the front door. He had put the chain on before he came up, as he always did when he was on his own, and sometimes he went down in the middle of the night to check that he had done so. His first thought was that it was the young people who bothered the neighbour next door, the one he saw painting his garden shed the day he moved in. Sometimes when they were sitting in their dining room, they heard banging noises and shouts and then young people running away laughing. That old man was the only dark-skinned person who lived in the street, apart from Jamal, who obviously lived in a house shared with other students and was not as vulnerably alone. He had often thought he should speak to the old man, show him courtesy, say some words of condolence to him about his persecution, but he did not. He did not know what to say. He just smiled to him now and then when they passed.

So Jamal’s first thought when he heard the noise at the door was that the youngsters, whom he had never seen but could picture in his mind, boys and girls between fifteen and seventeen, tightly fleshed and grinning, had somehow found out that his housemates were away for a few days and he was on his own, and decided this would be a good time to give him a bit of a scare. He thought himself cowardly about confrontations and did his best to avoid them. It was not only fear of pain that made him avoid them, but of being browbeaten and mocked by loud voices, of being made to look foolish by cruel laughter. Now he trembled a little as he ran downstairs, his mind racing with what he should do. The bell rang before he reached the door, which he saw was unlocked but was held tightly ajar by the chain. They should put a bolt on the door.

‘Who’s that?’ he asked, barking to disguise his terror.

He recognised Lena’s voice as soon as she spoke. She sounded worried and out of breath. He hurriedly unhooked the chain and let her in. In those few seconds while he struggled with the chain, he pictured her on the pavement, anxious, glancing over her shoulder at someone who had followed her down the street. When he opened the door, he expected to see eyes glittering in the dark behind her, but there were no terrors at her heels. His imagination was panicking him as usual. She looked weary, though, and as she walked in, she gave him a fragile relieved smile. Their front door opened straight into the dining area, and Lena put her bag down on a chair and stood there, looking uncertain. After a moment, she stepped forward and hugged him, and he held her, his arms fully around her, grateful for her embrace.